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Let me set a scene for you: A startup founder walks into a big corporate office. The corporate has spent hundreds of thousands setting up an "innovation lab." They've got the right buzzwords. They've got the budget. They've got the vision to "disrupt our industry" or "accelerate our digital transformation" or whatever the executive sponsor decided was this year's priority. Six months later, everything is dead. The startup burned through cash on a project that went nowhere. Th

You want to know the difference between people who say they're going to build something and people who actually build it? It's not talent. It's not funding. It's not even having the best idea. It's showing up during the crisis. I recently talked to Marcel Botha , who—along with a consortium team in New York—designed, built, and shipped 3,000 ventilators in 30 days during the COVID pandemic. Not as a PR stunt. Not as a lab exercise. They actually shipped them to hospitals in N

Picture this: You're sitting in some air-conditioned conference room, and someone's pitching you the next big thing in food security. They've got a slick PowerPoint. They've got numbers that look impressive. They've got funding locked up and a five-year strategic roadmap. But they've never actually been to the communities they're trying to help. They've never watched a woman in Peru figure out how to grow food in a shipping container in the urban slums. They've never seen wha

Here's a problem that most large organizations share but won't admit: They're scared of their own people. Not in the sense of fearing them individually. But scared that if they actually give people permission to think differently, to question the status quo, to try things that haven't been approved by five layers of management, then something will break. So they control it. They manage it. They set up innovation committees and innovation budgets and innovation frameworks. And

There's a VC video that went viral on Facebook a while ago. The guy was basically saying that startups should never ever work with corporate accelerators. According to him, it's a waste of time. Corporates don't have real interest in helping you. It's wishful thinking to believe otherwise. And here's what stuck with me about that: It's a lazy argument. It's the kind of sweeping statement that sounds wise but isn't actually true. I recently talked with Joyce Tay , the Chief St

Everyone's freaking out about AI. Robots. Automation. The future where machines do most of the work and humans sit around feeling obsolete. I get it. You pick up your phone and there's a new headline every day about some AI doing something that humans used to do. It's unsettling. It feels like the ground is shifting and nobody knows what to hold onto anymore. I recently talked with Tom Chi , who spent years at Google X building hardware, leading teams on projects that felt i

There's a moment that happens in almost every organization that tries to do something new. Someone sits in a meeting and says, "You know what we need? We need to find our why." And everyone nods. They've read the book. They know the TED talk. Your why is your purpose. Your north star. The thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. Find your why and everything else falls into place. Except it doesn't. I recently talked with Suzanne Vos , an innovation coach who works insid

Your company doesn't need a digital transformation. Your company needs to figure out why it hired you in the first place. I recently talked to Nevo Hadas , who runs DYDX , a digital transformation practice that works with companies across Europe and Africa. And in the first few minutes of our conversation, he said something that completely reframed how I think about this whole mess: "The reason a lot of changes don't stick is because people approach it from a technology persp

You know that uncomfortable feeling you get in the middle of creating something new? That moment where you don't quite know what you're building yet. You know the problem you're solving. You've got some ideas. But the final form isn't clear. The path forward isn't obvious. And everyone around you is getting antsy because they want certainty. That discomfort you're feeling? That's not a problem. That's the actual work. That's where innovation lives. Natalja Laurey , an anthrop

You've built something good. You know it's good. Your customers know it's good. Now comes the part that makes everyone uncomfortable: How much should you charge? Most people think pricing is something you figure out after you've built the product. You price based on costs plus margin. Or you price based on what competitors charge. Or you price based on some survey data about what customers say they're willing to pay. And then you wonder why you never get the adoption you expe

Imagine stepping into a room designed by an architect and stepping into a room designed by an engineer or a product manager. You might not immediately know the difference. But you'd feel it. The way light comes through. The way the space makes you move. The way it shapes how you think and what becomes possible. That's not an accident. It's intentional design. Most people—including most successful people in business—think of design as decoration. You design something after you

You probably haven't heard of a "venture architect." It's not a title that gets plastered across business school brochures. It doesn't have the sexy appeal of "growth hacker" or "innovation officer." But if you want to understand how corporate innovation actually works—how big, legacy organizations can actually build new things instead of just talking about building new things—you need to understand what a venture architect does. The role emerged at BCG's Digital Ventures arm

You've heard of incubators and accelerators. They're everywhere now. Some entrepreneurial-minded person somewhere is always launching the next revolutionary startup program. They'll get some venture money, rent a cool office space, maybe hire an ex-startup founder to run the program, and declare victory when three companies hit Series A. Then, ten years later, most of those companies are dead. The program is forgotten. The space gets repurposed. Here's the depressing truth: M

You're going to be very busy. Today. Tomorrow. Every day for the rest of your career, probably. Your inbox is overflowing. Your calendar is a Tetris game. You're in meetings about meetings. You have urgent fires to put out. A customer emergency. A colleague who needs help. Bugs in production. A new opportunity that looks promising. Your boss wants an update. And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, there are three things—maybe five, if you're being generous—that actuall

Picture this: You're sitting in a conference room at a Fortune 500 company. You have a good job. Decent salary. Benefits. Job security. And you're slowly losing your mind because you know there's something the company should be doing—something that could change everything—and it's not being done. You have two options. Leave and start a company (and risk everything), or stay and try to push the idea internally (and risk your career). Most people don't take either option. They

Most people get the startup ecosystem question completely backwards. They ask: "How do we build a thriving startup community?" The wrong question. And it leads to terrible solutions. You end up with government programs. With shiny incubators. With venture capital funds that don't know what they're doing. With conferences and networking events designed to force serendipity. And mostly, you end up with a bunch of stuff that looks good on paper and changes absolutely nothing abo

You've probably heard the term "Shanzhai" before. The assumption is that China copies. That innovation in China is derivative—taking Western ideas and making them slightly cheaper. And sure, there's some truth to that. But that's like thinking about American innovation and only mentioning the knockoffs. What's actually happening in China is so different from what's happening in the West that using the same vocabulary doesn't even work. The rules are inverted. The priorities a

The day you decide to start a business is the day you become an expert at making things up. You'll tell yourself you have a plan. You'll create a spreadsheet with projections. You'll workshop your positioning statement until it sounds exactly like everyone else's. And then you'll realize: You're just moving things around on a piece of paper while sitting in a coffee shop, trying to look like you belong there. This is the space where most would-be entrepreneurs get paralyzed.

You're the government. Or a development authority. Or an ambitious city leader. You want to be the next Silicon Valley. You want to attract startups. You want innovation jobs. You want economic growth. So you build an innovation hub. You announce it. And then you wonder why nothing happens. Because building an ecosystem isn't something you decide to do. It's something that either emerges or it doesn't. I recently talked with Oded Barel , who did something unusual in Jerusalem

You've got a brilliant PhD. You've published in top journals. You've had an insight that could change everything. Now you want to start a company. And you're about to make the same mistake 90% of brilliant scientists make. You're going to think like a scientist. Which is precisely the wrong mindset for building a company. I recently talked with Christian Tidona , who founded BiomedX —an institute that sits at the intersection of academia and industry, deliberately combining t